


On the Altar of Pride

by dawnstonedagger



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age - Various Authors, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Betrayal, Black Emporium, Character Death, Dark, Duty, Gen, M/M, Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-08
Updated: 2016-10-08
Packaged: 2018-08-20 07:15:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8240926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawnstonedagger/pseuds/dawnstonedagger
Summary: Solas could not afford distractions, he could not afford dissent, nor tender hearts.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gamerfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gamerfic/gifts).



> I hope this didn't go _too_ dark.

  
_“Deviating from the plan. No accounting for whimsy. Small differences lead to fatal consequences. I’m sorry.”_

—The spirit in the Tiniest Cave quest

-~*~-

It was painless. He owed him that much.

As his spirit dispersed, Felassan glimmered of pride and hope at the last; of that, and deep, deep sorrow. 

Solas let it wash over him.

The Fade carried his remains in eddies, to the places where memories would nurture his rebirth. Solas' memories, and those the eldest spirits yet held; pieces of what he was. Perhaps they would know each other again, one day, in another world. 

His sorrow was Solas’ sorrow—the kind that cut the spirit like cold knives, beyond even tears. Of their people so far fallen, so few in number, powerless and living in ruin and squalor. They had lost so much, it was hard for their Veil-blunted minds to even perceive.

Yet, Felassan, with his sentimental heart, would have them revel in their decay for another age, all for the sake of a single child he’d befriended. It had become real to him; he had accepted it.

One would think, knowing the stakes, that someone so intimately knowledgeable of everything they had fought for to begin with, would have been able to stave off such selfishness. 

Felassan had seen what Solas had seen with his own eyes, felt it with his spirit. They with the others, had deduced what could be done, what must be done, and how little time they had to do it. 

He had seen it. 

He knew.

The Veil had to be dismantled. It served no one but their oppressors, it harmed those it had been created to protect. Almost four millennia to rebuild themselves as a free and worthy people, but yet they suffered, and in far more dire circumstances than Solas had delivered them from. Blind, foolish animals, broken by the world he had unwittingly shaped, stripped of their fullness, their glory.

Left to his own devices, Felassan would have betrayed them again, as surely as Solas had, with his hope, with his pride, with his faith in them. 

They were truly a pair. 

Were…

Whatever their people had been, the sad remains of the Elvhen could never make a stand for themselves without access to half of their very selves.

The proof of it lay in their scattered, divided, desperate enclaves, cowering in the shadows of the plague of humans now overrunning the world; in the hollow crumbling ancient halls; in the poisoned lands beyond the Dales; in the dismal caravans where they hoarded fragments of lost knowledge, like moldering crumbs of once nourishing bread. 

Andruil would laugh to see what he had made of them.

Of him, now, alone, but for a few Fade-starved agents, their magic weak and limited; the spirits they could call upon, fragile and hungry for the world barred to them; him scraping together information clumsily with such inefficient resources available. 

He, the Dread Wolf, pathetic and weak, with no one he could trust but himself.

Solas had needed to be able to trust Felassan. Felassan knew it well enough... and he’d thrown it all away. 

Thrown everything away they’d ever been, ever had, ever could be, and for what?

Somehow, Solas could not find it in himself to be angry at him. 

For what he had loved about Felassan, was his ability to take joy in the moment, to champion what his heart told him was right. Felassan had always fallen in love too easily, even against his own best interests. Perhaps it was inevitable that he would find something to cherish in even this ruined world.

Unthinkable.

Solas felt a pang of what he hoped was not regret. He would not mourn, until his mistake was mended, the world freed of his greatest blunder. He could not afford distractions, he could not afford dissent, nor tender hearts. If he lived to see this to the end... 

The spirits who looked on, were shivering with the weight of his despair.

“I’m sorry, ma vhenan. You deserved better. They all deserved better,” he said. To the spirits, to the empty fire.

Turning away, he doused the flames with magic—in this world, and in waking—and padded back into the trackless Fade.


End file.
